Literary Nonfiction. Film Studies. Eastern Asian Studies. Translated by Pat Noonan and Takuo Yasuda. Afterword by Abe Mark Nornes. An authentic visionary of cinema, Japanese filmmaker Hara Kazuo has spent the past four decades pioneering a stark documentary style that challenged the mores of postwar Japanese society. His works feature dramatic narratives and characters—radicals, outcasts and those on the margins—who struggle against adversity: "I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society," Kazuo has avowed. CAMERA OBTRUSA is the first English-language publication addressing his work. Composed as a straightforward handbook, the volume offers Kazuo's technical notes on his groundbreaking filmmaking. As such, it is invaluable to students and scholars, but it is also peppered with anecdotes from the freewheeling filmmaker's life. CAMERA OBTRUSA also includes a full transcript of Kazuo's controversial and award-winning film The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987), a filmography and an afterward by distinguished Japanese film historian, Abe Markus Nornes.

Author Hometown: TOKYO JAP



About the author: Born in 1945, Hara Kazuo was influenced as a young man by the protest movements that took place throughout Japan and the world in the late 1960s and 70s. He founded Shisso Productions in 1971 with his wife, producer, and primary collaborator Sachiko Kobayashi. He has published five documentary films thus far, including the award-winning The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, widely recognized as the most important and influential documentary ever made in Japan, Goodbye CP, A Dedicated Life, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, and Watashi no Mishima.